Dream Gates

lucid dreaming Archives

You are the final authority on your dreams, and you should never give the power of your dreams away by handing them over to other people to interpret. Yes, our dreams can be confusing and opaque, and we gain greatly […]

There is a people of the South Pacific who say that there are as many afterlife situations as there are human imaginations. They may be right. What we encounter on the Other Side is conditioned by our desires, our courage […]

In many human cultures the most profound insights into the nature of the divine and the fate of the soul after physical death have been attributed to ecstatic journeys beyond the body in waking dream or vision. In most human […]

Early fathers of the Christian church were in favor of active dreaming and astral travel. Tertullian, who famously observed that “most people derive their knowledge of God from dreams” urged Christians who found themselves in captivity, perhaps on the way to […]

The best way to grasp the meaning of a dream, and to determine what action the dream requires, is to go back inside the dream and recover more of the story. We should never confuse a dream report – what […]

Harriet Tubman dreamed of flying to freedom, over landscapes she subsequently crossed on foot when she made her escape from slavery in the South. Later she was guided by specific precognitive or clairvoyant dreams to safe houses, river crossings and […]

Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us on the roads of life. It’s possible that we rehearse everything that will take place in the future in our dreams, though we forget most […]

Contact with the deceased, especially in dreams, is natural and easy if we are open to it. It’s a very common experience. Our dead may still be around, because they have not yet moved on and that can be problematic […]

Let’s start with baby steps. Many of us in the contemporary world have been suffering a prolonged dream drought. You want to end the drought and renew your connection with your dreams. So you set a juicy intention for the […]

A dream is a wake-up call. It takes us beyond what we already know. Dreams are the language of the soul, and they are experiences of the soul. There are “big” dreams and “little” dreams, of course. In big dreams, […]

The shaman’s primary tool for journeying is the single-headed frame drum, the type we use in Active Dreaming circles. I am constantly astonished, though no longer surprised, by how quickly this ancient instrument can help even the most rational, cognicentric […]

Let’s be candid: Jung’s Red Book is not for the faint-hearted. Yes, there are passages of incandescent beauty, perhaps beyond any other of his writings. There are also vertiginous falls into places of rank terror and screaming madness. In my […]

After a lifetime of exploring and sharing dreams, I have invented a fun way to share dreams, get some nonauthoritarian and nonintrusive feedback, and move toward creative action. I call this the Lightning Dreamwork Game. It’s like lightning in two […]

Chen Tuan (871-989) was a celebrated Taoist sage who lived a secluded life in mountain caves in China, where he created kung fu and a method of conscious dreaming. He was an ardent student of I Ching. He reputedly wandered […]

Janice likes to walk dreams, as you or I might walk the dog. Sometimes she walks her own dreams. As a teacher of Active Dreaming who plays guide for others, she often walks other people’s dreams, like one of those […]

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi related a wonderful teaching story about interactive dreaming in The Dream Assembly. A bunch of Hasidic rabbis are discussing the goals of prayer. Instead of joining the debate, Zalman says, “I would like all of you to […]

I died for the first time in my present body when I was three years old. My mother’s aunt, the opera singer, saw my death in the tea leaves a few months before it happened. She would not talk about […]

How do you become an active dreamer? Let’s start with baby steps. Many of us in the contemporary world have been suffering a prolonged dream drought. You want to end the drought and renew your connection with your dreams. So […]

True shamans are dreamers. They are typically called to their vocation in dreams, and dreaming strong – traveling in lucid dreams to help souls find their way, to diagnose and treat illness, and to scout out the future – is […]

When I was writing my book Dreaming True, I asked for guidance from the night on how to bring the gifts of dreaming to a broader audience in our society. I dreamed I was teaching the history of the Underground Railroad […]

I am out in the woods in the middle of the night, on Cortes Island. I notice other figures, animal and human and hybrid, moving among the trees, taking form then fading back into the shadows. I find three clear and reliable […]

Our spiritual guides take forms adjusted to our understanding. “I saw him in the way I was able to perceive him,” runs a line on this subject in the Gnostic Acts of Thomas. In the Western Mystery tradition, the term […]

Dreams make us whole. They show us the many aspects of ourselves and help us to bring them under one roof. That is why it is often useful to ask “what part of me” different characters and elements in a […]

Our dreams are constantly coaching us for challenges and opportunities that lie ahead of us on the roads of life. It’s possible that we rehearse everything that will take place in the future in our dreams, though we forget most […]

What is soul loss? When we suffer trauma or bitter disappointment or violent shock, soul may leave the body, to escape. This produces the phenomenon that psychologists call dissociation and shamans call soul loss. It can be seen as a […]

Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the threshold where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open Don’t go back to sleep. These wonderful lines from Rumi remind us that the easiest way […]

A moving guest blog on dreams that helped family and friends through the passages of life and death, by Valerie McCarney. an artist, hospice volunteer and gifted teacher of Active Dreaming DREAMS THAT COMFORT AND HEAL by Valerie McCarney Comfort […]

Of Dream and Art a guest blog by Véronique Barek-Deligny Véronique is a gifted teacher of Active Dreaming and creative art in France. In this moving and beautiful personal narrative, she describes how dreams revealed family history that was previously unknown, gave […]

Why do so many adults in Western society deny that they dream or insist that dreams do not matter? These attitudes are partly the work of societal pressures, and of the authority we have assigned to two kinds of authority: […]

I have a dream: that we will again become a society of dreamers. In a dreaming culture, dreams are valued and celebrated. The first business of the day, for most people, is to share dreams and seek to harvest their […]

In our contemporary society, when analysts and dream “experts” take dreams seriously, they usually approach them from just one perspective, as sets of symbols to be decoded. Certainly our dream life is rich in symbols. Etymologically, a symbol is […]

Navigating by synchronicity is the dreamer’s way of operating in daily life. The word “synchronicity” was coined by Jung to flag patterns of meaningful coincidence. He defined “synchronicity” as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have […]

A yellow Mini Cooper is becoming another of my personal markers, like the friendly black dog or the red-tailed hawk. There is an oneiric logic to some of its appearances, on the roads of more than one world. It makes […]

A yellow Mini Cooper is becoming another of my personal markers, like the friendly black dog or the red-tailed hawk. There is an oneiric logic to some of its appearances, on the roads of more than one world. It makes […]

Have you ever said, “it’s only a dream”? While we often dismiss dreams, or fail to make room for them in the hurry of our daily lives, dreams can be a fabulous source of guidance, healing and juice for any […]

Most human societies have valued dreams and the dreamers for three principal reasons. They have recognized that in dreams we see the future, and this can help whole communities as well as individuals to make better choices. They have understood […]

When we experience synchronicity, we often have the sense that powers beyond our ordinary perception have come into play. Coincidence is when the universe gets personal. Heraclitus said (in paraphrase) that the deepest logic of our lives is a child […]

As I lay in bed early on a rainy Saturday morning, it occurred to me that the drifty state after waking can sometimes be – quite literally – the Solution State. I did not initially have narrative dream recall. Instead, […]

A man who came to one of my first public dream classes told the group, “I am here because I think I have been missing the movies.” His statement was right on. One morning, when I myself woke with no […]

If we could fold time, travel forward a century or two, and then look backward, I believe we would find abundant confirmation that the rise of the dreamwork movement is one of the most important developments of the modern era. […]

What is a shaman? First and last, the shaman is a dreamer. Shamans typically receive their calling in dreams and are initiated and trained in the Dreamtime. The heart of their practice is the intentional dream journey. They may incubate […]

You have dreamed the future. You say you don’t remember? Think again. Surely you’ve had the experience of déjà vu. The cat crosses the street in front of you, the tall guy steps into the restaurant, the light shimmers on […]

Dreaming is all about soul. This is why dreaming is true medicine for our lives and our worlds. The soul speaks to us in dreams, reminding of our purpose, our potential and our present condition. When we listen, we begin […]

If you rarely remember dreams, or have been going through a dry spell, don’t worry about it. Catching dreams is fun; don’t make it a chore. Think of it as going on a blind date with a friend you can […]

You’re separated from your sweetheart and you’d like to have some good private time together. Can you do that? Absolutely. As in the old song, “you can reach [him or her] with your mind.” The next question is: Your place […]

The sun rises from behind the mountains, and golden light bursts over the lake. Though the analogy is too pedestrian for the glory of this moment, it seems to me that an immense light bulb has come on, impossible to […]

Dreaming is the best preparation for dying because in dreams we travel the same roads, out of the body, that we will take after death, when we no longer have physical bodies. In our dreams, we are released from the […]

Dreams are not on our case; they are on our side. This is one of my personal mantras about dreams and (yes) it applies even to nightmares. In my personal lexicon, a nightmare is not only a “bad” or scary […]

Dreaming is healing. Our bodies speak to us in dreams, giving us early warning of symptoms we might develop, showing us what they need to stay well. Dreams give us fresh and powerful images for self-healing. Dreams are also the […]

Many things unknown, and unwished for, nor ever attempted by our minds, are manifested to us in dreams, also the representations of unknown places appear, and the images of men both alive and dead, and of things to come are […]

Until recently, I was not an enthusiast for the term “lucid dreaming”, because it came to be associated with silly notions of “controlling” or “manipulating” dreams. Through dreaming, we have access to a source that is infinitely wiser and deeper […]

The gateways you discover in night dreams and twilight states are the best, safest and most timely starting points for conscious dream journeys, including shamanic soul-flight. With practice, you will find you can have wonderful adventures riding that dream elevator, exploring […]

I went to see Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln today and found it mostly wonderful. Near the beginning, we see a dramatization of one of Lincoln’s recurring dreams of being on a boat that is heading into the mist, a boat on which […]

Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It’s about waking up. In ordinary life, we are often in the condition of sleepwalkers, going through the motions, trying to keep up with pre-set schedules and to meet other people’s […]

You have dreamed the future. You say you don’t remember? Think again. Surely you’ve had the experience of déjà vu. The cat crosses the street in front of you, the tall guy steps into the restaurant, the light shimmers on […]

Confused by your dreams? You could try asking tonight for a straight-up dream. Let me explain. Some dreams take a lot of tending. We need to walk with them and around them for a while, letting different layers and possible […]

What are the first steps we need to take to work with our dreams? First, consider your feelings on waking. Those feeling will be your first and best guidance on the nature and meaning of the dream – whether it […]

Most human cultures before the modern era have valued dreams as a source of healing. It was widely understood, for starters, that dreams can diagnose what’s going on inside the body. One of the ways to understand dreams is that […]

Many of us yearn for contact with departed loved ones. We miss them; we ache for forgiveness or closure; we yearn for confirmation that there is life beyond physical death. This is one of the main reasons why people go […]

In the passage in Dante’s Purgatorio where he encounters his radiant guide in the form of a lovely woman called Beatrice, she reproaches him for not heeding the dreams in which she sought him, over many years. The message […]

Horses run through our dreams. We wake, hearts pounding, still feeling the thunder of the hoofbeats. Our dream horses are not the same, of course. Some are oppressed by dreams of a black horse that seems like a figure of […]

Imagine that you can make yourself incredibly small and travel inside the body and repair its cells structure and balance its flows from within. Imagine you can travel across time and visit a younger self and provide the counsel and […]

Indigenous and ancestral shamans know that we are all connected to the world of the animal powers, and that by recognizing and nurturing our relation with animal spirits, we find and follow the natural path of our energies. Yet many […]

From the shaman’s perspective, soul loss is the root cause of much illness and affliction in our lives. We suffer deep grief, abuse or trauma – or succumb to negative habits and addictions – or are torn apart by wrenching […]

I suffered major soul loss as a young boy in Australia. I died for the first time within this life, aged three, during a brutal winter in Tasmania, when I succumbed to pneumonia in both lungs and lost vital signs […]

I’m intrigued by nights in which we slip from one dream into another, as if moving from an outer to an inner courtyard. Sometimes the shift is marked by the experience of falling asleep and waking up inside the dream […]

I had a grand time overnight, talking to George Noory on Coast to Coast AM for three hours about how we can use the core techniques of Active Dreaming to empower and heal our lives. Active Dreaming is a way […]

We do not know where death awaits us, so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. This wisdom comes […]

I started a recent workshop, as I often do, by inviting the participants to imagine themselves, in standing meditation, putting down roots into the earth, like a tree. As the meditation deepened, they found themselves rising between earth and sky, […]

A young woman in my Chicago workshop last Saturday shared a dream of that morning in which the Moon appeared and came closer and closer until she could walk on it. She met a wise and good-humored guide who showed […]

Marija Gimbutas declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess: “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater as we discover that the path of ‘progress’ is extinguishing the very conditions for […]

The most original and revealing scientific study of dreams – the only kind that is likely to bring us the big stuff – is research inside dreams, rather than research about dreams. Charting a path for future research, William C. […]

Frederick Buechner once said, “Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it’s like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is […]

The senses come richly alive in certain dreams. My last dream on Thursday morning was ablaze with color. After walking a long path under an overcast sky, I paused on a terrace overlooking green woods. Suddenly the trees and bushes […]

Everyone has their own bowl of sky. I woke with this beautiful and mysterious line echoing in my mind. At first, I could remember nothing more from the dream that had delivered it. But as I lay in bed in […]

We often wake with a dream hangover, even if we don’t recall the dreams that caused it. Freud said that dreams are full of “day residue”, thoughts and memories left over from waking life. It is no less true that […]

Your departure gate for lucid dreaming and adventures beyond the body is open to you any time you are ready to fly. It is the twilight zone of hypnagogia, the half-dream state on the cusp between waking and sleep and […]

People love the healing story of the twelve lights that Bonnie Horrigan shared on my radio show this week, and which I wrote about in my previous article here. I have received lots of email and Facebook messages from people […]

“I want to tell you my personal experience of dream healing,” Bonnie Horrigan said when she joined me for a conversation on my Way of the Dreamer radio show today. “I was in hospital with a serious liver condition. It […]

One of the readers of yesterday’s blog essay on “Messages from Hawk” asked a provocative question: “Seems we could learn much from Hawk. What do we have to offer Hawk?” I am going to respond here rather fully, from my […]

I have been privileged to lead dream workshops in Lithuania three times, at the invitation of my friend Rita Baniene, and each visit has been a grand adventure and a deepening encounter with the spirits of the land. When I […]

We dream for our communities and our world, as well as for ourselves and those near to us. We can learn to do this as a conscious practice in the service of peace and healing. By bringing dreams into the […]

Here’s an open secret: dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It’s about waking up. In ordinary life, we are often in the condition of sleepwalkers, going through the motions, trying to keep up with pre-set schedules and […]

“The Iroquois have, properly speaking, only a single Divinity – the dream. To it they render their submission, and follow all its orders with the utmost exactness.” – Father Jacques Frémin, S.J., 1669-70 Long before the first Europeans arrived, the […]

I am at a conference center where they are setting up for lunch in the huge dining area. I notice many loaves of Italian bread that seem to be freshly baked, placed on fresh white tablecloths. There’s a gathering in process […]

In the middle of the night, I am roused by a knock on the door. I go reluctantly to answer, and find a smiling man with a strangely innocent face standing outside in the moonlight. He says, “I come from […]

Here are the open secrets of the Dreamtime. These insights, shared by many dreaming traditions and indigenous peoples, challenge the ruling paradigms of a culture that confuses the real with thephysical. They free us from the delusion that dreams are by-products of brain […]

Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of Old Europe and its Goddess traditions, declared with urgent clarity in The Civilization of the Goddess, her chef d’oeuvre: “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity of this has never been greater […]

Shamans understand that soul loss is the root of much illness and confusion in our lives. It may be caused by pain or trauma or heartbreak, by wrenching life choices, or by wimping out on our best and bravest dreams. It […]

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James observed that “The founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.” That “direct personal communion” has been conducted through dreams and […]

The dreamgates open paths to spontaneous healing. This was the shared wisdom of the ancient world. It calls to us again, in our dreams, to move beyond our fixation with physical symptoms to the spiritual causes of wellness and illness. […]

How much a culture understands of the practice of dreaming is reflected in the variety and specificity of the terms it uses for different types of dream experience. The Hawaiian language contains a rich vocabulary for dreaming that makes a […]

As we learn to share and celebrate our dreams, we find that dreaming brings us, and our communities, back to the place of the heart. When I was teaching inCalifornia, I found myself in a dream that made this very […]

In yesterday’s article, we saw how Daniel found a dream that King Nebuchadnezzar II claimed he had lost. Scholars suspect that the content of the symbolic dream of the composite statue was invented in Hellenistic times, perhaps around 200 BCE, […]

Nebuchadnezzar II was the warrior-king of Babylon who laid waste to Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s Temple, and deported the Jews of Palestine into exile. An intriguing episode from Nebuchadnezzar’s reign (605-562 BCE) provides a window into an ancient way of dreaming. […]

You’re separated from your sweetheart and you’d like to have some good private time together. Can you do that? Absolutely. As in the old song, “you can reach [him or her] with your mind.” The next question is: Your place […]

I recommend getting to know Death, and approaching life’s choices with the clarity that the presence of Death brings. Saint Ignatius Loyola, the warrior-father of the Jesuit order and no slouch at visualization, recommended the following means of making a […]

To understand the important things and live that knowledge, we need poetic clarity. When I was writing my Dreamer’s Book of the Dead, I turned for that often to one of my favorite dead poets, W.B. Yeats. Yeats’s fullest account […]

Reading the great cycle of Welsh epics known as the Mabinogion with the eye of a dreamer, we can discern an ancient account from the British Isles of the technique I call dream reentry – going back inside a dream […]

Today, the agreed “laws” of physics tell us the following: – Time travel into the future is possible. – Time travel into the past may be possible. (Einstein, in his time and in my dreamtime, maintains that it is not […]

Our dream memories are often like postcards or snapshots from a journey. We have an image or two from an adventure that goes far beyond what we remember. You look at a postcard from your trip to Paris and there […]

The best way to grasp the meaning of a dream, and to determine what action the dream requires, is to go back inside the dream and recover more of the story. We should never confuse a dream report – what […]

Have you ever wondered what would have happened had you made a different choice – or had the world made a different choice for you – at an important crossroads in your earlier life? I’m sure all of us have […]

In one of my workshops, a woman I’ll call Lois shared a dream titled “War”. She was very agitated and upset as she retold it. I am on patrol with six women dressed in green uniforms. We are all riding […]

“Source Code” is a superior sci-fi action thriller, satisfying as entertainment while getting us to think about such small matters as what happens after death and whether the past can be changed. Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), a US Army […]

Drawing from dreams is a fabulous way to get their energy moving. Giving spontaneous expression to our visions in this way brings out the child and the artist inside us. It also provides a fun record of our inner life, […]

Red horses are racing above mountain tops. They are flying over the hills, immense and powerful. Plumes of steam rise from their nostrils. From the steam, men fall to the ground; they appear to be tiny stick figures in proportion […]

When I lie down in the early hours, I have the deep sense of contact with a Higher Self. I feel lightness, clarity and well-being. I am encouraged to shift my attention, and entered the vision space. I see brilliant […]

Looking over old journals as I cull experiential material for a new book, I am reminded just how many of my big experiences of inner and other worlds have taken place in a liminal state of consciousness, on the cusp […]

Active Dreaming? The phrase is a provocation, designed to shake us free from the assumption that dreaming is a passive activity. I am grateful for the gift of spontaneous sleep dreams, the ones we don’t ask for and often don’t […]

In one of my workshops in Boulder, Colorado, I was privileged to go on shared journeys into the dreamworlds with a Navajo (Dine) elder named Abraham. He told me he had driven up from Flagstaff because, “I have heard that […]

Dreaming is traveling. In our dream bodies we get out there, leaving the physical body behind. This goes on every night whether we intend it or not. Lucid dreamers, intentional astral travelers and shamanic journeyers embark on these excursions consciously. […]

A green door in a white wall, with a creeper trailing about it. You push the door, and find it unlocked. You enter, and discover yourself in a garden of surpassing beauty, where a lovely friend takes you by the […]

All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream – Edgar Allen Poe I’ve been thinking about how we travel between different levels of dreaming, consciously or unconsciously. I recently quoted the statement of Ruby Modesto, […]

Ruby Modesto’s first personal experience of soul recovery came when she was ten years old. She went so far and so deep in a dream odyssey that she could not find her way back to her body. As she tells […]

Ruby Modesto grew up on the Martinez reservation in southern California. Her dreams called her to become a pul, or shaman, introducing her to the eagle that became her ally, giving her wings for flight. She did not need the […]

A note from my 1999 journal: After a long work day, I sat up with Tenzin Wangyal’s book on Tibetan dream yoga. Quite a lot of it appeals to me, especially the guidance on using dream states for emotional clearing, […]

A woman dreamer finds herself in a different body, traveling with her clan beside a river in a primal landscape untouched by the ax. She knows the lives and relations of these native people intimately, and feels the coming of […]

I was asked the question, “What does it mean when my hubby and I share the same dreams?” The question became more interesting when the dreamer added, “We dream we can jump and each time we stay up in the […]

Dreaming, we are time travelers. We step outside linear Chronos time into a more spacious dimension, from which we can descend into times past or times future. When we wake up to what is possible, we can travel consciously into […]

Cara was haunted by horrific dreams of blood and death in Vietnam for forty years. As described in yesterday’s article, in our work together I realized that we needed to determine exactly how memories that did not belong to her […]

It’s starting again. She is in the jungle, and it steams and stinks. She sees Asian men in rags through the green tangle, and knows they will kill her if they can. Overhead, the whir of choppers beats the air, […]

A friend of mine who is a generally prolific dreamer was puzzled as to why she felt she was losing the memory of some important dream experiences. “Sometimes I go deeper than deep,” she told me. “I go down through […]

I heard from a friend just now that she dreamed of the Deer overnight and woke feeling blessed relief from the cruel back pain that had been oppressing her. I have come to know the Deer as a remarkable ally […]

Here’s a plan for growing a dream family. Get a few friends together and practice the Lightning Dreamwork technique, the fun and fast method for everyday dream-sharing you’ll find explained in detail in my new book Active Dreaming and in […]

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Eva declared early in my recent Soul Recovery workshop in France. “I’m not a dreamer. I haven’t remembered any dreams since I was seven years old.” I suggested, gently, that this situation was […]

Soul loss, as shamans know, is at the root of many of our existential complaints – of chronic fatigue and depression, of addictions and autoimmune problems, of creative blockage and even “bad luck”. If we are missing vital soul energy, […]

Contrary to what we are often told, dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It’s about waking up. In ordinary life, we are often in the condition of sleepwalkers, going through the motions, trying to keep up with […]

A huge, woolly bear in fierce warrior guise is storming through many scenes of battle. Her footfalls make thunder in the earth. Soldiers of an ancient army crumple before her, as if a mountain has fallen on them. I have […]

Calling all dreamers: My next “Way of the Dreamer” radio show on healthylife.net will be LIVE with call-ins next TUESDAY, January 10th. Please call in with dreams and questions to share. We’ll play the Lightning Dreamwork game and explore the many ways […]

We have precious few clues to just what was going on in the disturbed mind of the young man who shot U.S. Rep. Gabrelle Giffords and killed several others in a horrific crime in Tucson on Sunday. While we pray […]

A quick note on what flowed from the New Years assignment I suggested for dreamers in a recent blog article: to send the dream self out to scout what lies ahead in 2011. This has produced a cornucopia of dream […]

Have you ever wondered what would have happened had you made a different choice – or had the world made a different choice for you – at an important crossroads in your earlier life? I’m sure all of us have […]

I am walking in deep, springy grass, humming a little hum, a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh.. Ahead of me, near a fine lake, is a great tree, and I know that important things are waiting for me if only I can […]

This weekend, a gathering of frequent fliers will assemble on a mountain in the New York Adirondacks for our 15th year together. The heart of this mountain is garnet fire. The ancestral spirits of this land are of the branch […]

I haven’t much favored the term “lucid dream” – though I’ve been a lucid dreamer all of my life – because of past associations with agendas for “controlling” or “manipulating” dreams. But as the discussion matures, especially since the publication […]

I’m not enthusiastic about the term “lucid dreaming” because it has often been associated with silly notions of “controlling” or “manipulating” dreams. Through dreaming, we have access to a source that is infinitely wiser and deeper than the everyday ego, […]

The ancient Egyptians understood that in dreams, our eyes are opened. Their word for dream, rswt, is etymologically connected to the root meaning “to be awake”. It was written with a symbol representing an open eye. The Egyptians believed that the […]

After a murky sequence in my dreams last night, when I needed to avoid various dangers and distractions, I found myself lying at the edge of the ocean in marvelous gleaming morning sunlight. With my legs in the water, I […]

It happened again last night. I was rushing around between cities and airports in Europe, and realized I did not have directions for a house where I had an appointment. I decided to call the people I was visiting, and […]

In Manhattan this morning, in the breakfast room of my hotel prior to opening the second of my workshops at the NY Open Cenetr, I watched a long interview with a psychologist I know and like on the Today Show, […]

In one line: the movie “Inception” is more exciting in its conception than in its delivery. It offers some great talking-points and plenty to chew on for anyone interested in dreaming and the physics of non-ordinary reality. On the other […]

Shared dreaming is not only wonderful fun. It can help us on the roads of everyday life. It can save your job. Consider the following true-life narrative, involving a couple I know well: George, a senior executive, dreamed he received […]

I’m looking forward to seeing the movie Inception. Judging by the advance notices, the director, and the cast, I expect it to be brilliant. I have one reservation. It’s not about the movie itself. It’s about the problematic use of […]

Welcome to a path of limitless adventure, healing and possibility. The Aborigines of my native Australia believe that our personal dreams may open doorways into the Dreamtime, the deeper reality from which the events and circumstances of our lives are […]

Aboriginal Dreaming into the DreamtimeAboriginal Australians believe that we dream our way into this world, and dream our way out of it.
"We talk to the spirit-child before a baby is born," naturopath and traditional healer Burnham Burnham explained it to me. If the father-to-be ...

In Search of the Antlered Goddess of the WaysThe British visionary artist Chesca Potter says that when she moved to London, she had a vision of an immense goddess figure, dressed in green and gold, over the church of St Pancras. This is the oldest church, in the city, founded ...

The only dream expert is YOUYou are the final authority on your dreams, and you should never give the power of your dreams away by handing them over to other people to interpret. Yes, our dreams can be confusing and opaque, and we gain greatly from other people's insights, ...

Dreaming is practice for immortalityThere is a people of the South Pacific who say that there are as many afterlife situations as there are human imaginations. They may be right. What we encounter on the Other Side is conditioned by our desires, our courage and our imagination (or ...

Dreams are not on our case, they are on our sideOur dreams show us things we may prefer not to think about — which is a major reason why many of us slam that door shut on our dreams and try to keep it closed. Those things may include future life problems, or parts of ourselves we tend to ...

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About the Author

Robert Moss
Robert Moss is a world-renowned dream explorer, the creator of Active Dreaming, an original method of dreamwork and healing, and the author of nine books on dreaming, shamanism, and the imagination.» Posts by Robert Moss